The Best Ways to Make Landscaping Profitable
There’s an old business adage that says if you’d like to make more money in your business, you should do it by working smarter—not harder. If you feel like you’re pumping everything you (and your crew) have into generating revenues in your landscape company and still feel like you’re falling short on your bottom line, it may be time to look into your profit strategies.
How to Make Your Landscaping Company More Profitable
If you feel like you’re using brute force to sell more, do more, and be more to turn a profit, this is usually a sign that something in your landscape company’s profit strategy can be improved.
Below, we discuss 7 ways you can start making your landscape company more profitable today.
1) Know Your Costs
Any CFO will tell you that one of the main reasons a landscape or green service company is struggling to generate profits is because they misunderstand or misattribute costs. The profitability of every single job starts before the job ever takes place—when the job is being quoted.
In order to provide an accurate quote that falls within your profit margin goals, you should have a clear idea of the associated costs. This includes not only labor and materials, but also drive time and gas, employee benefits, equipment depreciation, and more. Learn more about job costing in this article: Lawn Care Business Job Costing can Make or Break Your Business.
2) Perform Post-Job Analysis
Any CFO will tell you that one of the main reasons a landscape or green service company is struggling to generate profits is because they misunderstand or misattribute costs. The profitability of every single job starts before the job ever takes place—when the job is being quoted.
In order to provide an accurate quote that falls within your profit margin goals, you should have a clear idea of the associated costs. This includes not only labor and materials, but also drive time and gas, employee benefits, equipment depreciation, and more. Learn more about job costing in this article: Lawn Care Business Job Costing can Make or Break Your Business.
3) Schedule More Jobs Per Day
While scheduling more jobs per day isn’t always the right answer, finding the right line between the amount of work your crews can handle and a reasonable schedule can help improve the profitability of your landscape company. The idea is to maximize your resources (labor and time) while minimizing downtime (such as driving between appointments, changing out equipment or materials, etc.).
It can be helpful to invest in a landscape crew scheduling software that helps make strategic scheduling decisions based on drive time, equipment, materials, and crew. Not only does this help minimize gas costs, but it also helps you maximize your time and resources.
4) Minimize Drive Time
This is mentioned in the above point, but it’s important enough to restate. Scheduling appointments in a way that minimizes drive time is a great step in improving the profitability of your business. This is because strategic scheduling minimizes gas costs while helping reduce wasted crew time.
This change can also be quickly implemented into your landscaping business with a scheduling software for service businesses. Tools like these help balance crew availability with client expectations while minimizing drive time without requiring your scheduler to do time-consuming job and location analysis.
5) Don’t Let Inventory Sit Too Long
Inventory sitting in your warehouse is tied-up capital, and it’s important for landscape business owners to look at it that way. Any inventory that is sitting in your warehouse is an asset that you’re not currently able to use to grow your business. Instead, business owners should make the goal of holding inventory for as short a period as possible.
Landscape business owners can help improve their business cash flow by having a supply chain management system in place that not only tracks inventory but also helps to see what is needed for confirmed projects, as well as what is needed for upcoming or prospective projects. This type of tracking not only helps make sure you have what you need when you need it, but also provides robust reports to better analyze trends that help make more strategic buying decisions in the future.
6) Don’t Take Previous Clients for Granted
Your profits in your landscaping company are not only affected by the labor and equipment costs associated with the job, but also by the time and investment in acquiring that customer in the first place. This is why previous clients should be a priority for landscaping companies.
The more work you can generate from a single client, the higher your profits for those projects since they don’t require additional client acquisition costs.
Instead of waiting for previous clients to come back to you year after year, be proactive and reach out to them first. Offer reminders to get on the schedule, thank them for being a loyal customer, or offer them for incentives while working to re-secure their business for the new year. This change not only helps fill your schedule early in the year, but also helps to improve profits for your landscaping company by bringing business that doesn’t require additional customer acquisition costs.
This can sometimes be time-consuming. However, with the Arborgold bulk batch renewal system, reaching out to previous clients to initiate the renewal process can be quick and easy.
7) Upsell Existing Clients
The cheapest clients to sell are the clients you already have. If your customers already have a positive relationship with you and you’ve built a relationship of trust, you may be able to add on additional services to build value for the customer (and profits for you). This can help improve your profits for the same reason repeat customers can: because it doesn’t require the same client acquisition costs of a new lead.
Make sure your upsells are truly a value-add to the client. Use your database to view previous services or products, and offer personalized recommendations based on their work history. Using an automated email tool integrated into your CRM can help filter your customers based on services and most recent service dates, making it easy to send a quick email to recommend an add-on service that will add value for the client.
Get Started
Learn more about how Arborgold landscape management software can help take your landscape business to the next level. Click “Take a Tour of Arborgold” below to start your free trial today.
Share this resource
